Wednesday, 19 December 2012

I’ve just completed teaching
a ten-day meditation retreat at Amaravati in Hertfordshire, England. For those
of you who know the retreat scene, it was in many ways typical: about fifty
people of a range of nationalities and ethnicities gathered together, keeping
the eight Buddhist Precepts, maintaining silence, many bedding down in a
dormitory or sharing a room with a stranger. For the group the day started
before 5a.m. and finished around 10p.m.; there was an ongoing schedule of
talks, discussions, and a lot of sitting still. Despite the winter ice and snow,
the retreatants practised walking meditation outside – swathed in down-vests,
balloon-like coats and wraps. Some even spent their spare time sitting on
benches overlooking the surrounding fields. The breakfast and a midday meal
were eaten communally; there was a qi gung session and optional yoga. People
churned through their drowsiness, pain, stress and self-hatred; they melted
some stuck stuff out of their systems and concluded the retreat with warmth and
humour. After the retreat, they streamed into the teacher’s room to express
gratitude, offer small gifts, and request more of the same next year.

As for costs: I get no
remuneration, the cooks are unpaid volunteers, and the Centre itself quietly
informs people that the living costs are about £25/day but there is no charge.
You give what you like. For many it could be cheaper than staying at home.
Often people offering food to the monastery of which the Centre is a part, will
send some food over in support. The talks are recorded, edited and loaded
online for free; a lay supporter will make CDs and distribute them at his own
cost. All in all, a lot is produced from
one resource – the human heart – at minimal financial and
environmental expense.

Back at Cittaviveka, we’ve
just concluded the forest work month, which amounts to three weeks of work in
our woods – cutting coppice for fuel, stacking logs, planting new trees
and heather, and building boxes for bats to live in. This work has been going
on since 1986; gradually a self-sustaining woodland has come into being. The desolate
silence of a commercial monoculture of non-native trees has been replaced with
a mixed habitat of native broadleaf, heathland and wetland – and the
insects and birds have returned, along with bats, badgers, deer and dormice.
This work has been carried almost entirely by volunteers, with whatever costs
that accrued through using chainsaws or professionals being offset by the sale
of firewood or by donations. The coppice that is cut produces new shoots, so
the monastery gets heated with no loss of resources. And not only has the land
and the wildlife improved, but the men who volunteer and spend three weeks in
the monastery working together in the cold and rain with the monks speak warmly
of the benefit. ‘It’s the best choice I’ve ever made in my life,’ said the Cambridge
graduate. Some come year after year.

So how well does the notion
of the self-centred human, motivated by profit and personal gain, stand up in
this light? What is noticeable is that when given a free choice, people incline
towards voluntary service and towards taking on a challenge. Even in a non-Buddhist context: when there is
some clear space and autonomy, people decide to learn to play piano, take on
hospice work, give blood, teach Dhamma, create open source software – because
they like to; especially if they feel that someone else will benefit from
it. I would go so far as to say, that a
person who doesn’t have an occasion to freely offer is liable to suffer from
depression, narcissistic introversion, anxiety and isolation. This is ‘not-self’ as a practice. To
emphasize: not-self isn’t a wipe-out of our individual freedom or vitality, but
a direct pointer to what inhibits this heart and mind. It’s just these
inclinations to own, defend, assert or compare – all the programs that making
the mind into a self brings about. As a workaday practice, ‘not-self’ means ‘to
others as to myself’; and in meditation it’s the ongoing reminder to meet and
melt that sense of being alone in a world that has died to me. So you do
not-self through giving, through ethical integrity, through pruning desires
down to needs, and through the patience, clarity and honesty of meditation. The
results of developing such pāramī speak
for themselves.

Apart from any ‘inner’
benefits, the first three pāramī – giving,
morality, and renunciation – make profound economic and environmental sense. The
more you can share your life, the wider your field of conscience and concern,
and the less you have to consume – the lighter and more kindly your footprint
is on the environment. The three work together: How do you filter out needs
from the bubbling tide of wants that surges out in consumer-fever, especially
in this Christmas season? Find and rest back in your inner wealth, that’s
how. How do you generate inner wealth?
Open the heart like a generous hand, whether in terms of things or service, or
even in giving attention to others’ needs – that’s a good place to start.
Developing the holistic integrity ‘to others as to myself’ to include a
widening field of humans and creatures – that also causes the natural
bounty of the heart-mind to become apparent.
Then meditate on these and realize that this heart-mind, along with
every crumb of matter is given – not owned or deserved. So having so much, you
don’t want that much, or to be that much; and you look out for how you can participate
in a sharing universe. In ‘not-self’ is endless wonder and gratitude.

The turning point is often
how to get started. When one is conditioned into self-view (that is
‘isolationist-view’) choices come down to ‘how to get, or how to be more than I
sense I am.’ And yes, there’s a real
predicament when one is disadvantaged, homeless or depressed. There doesn’t
seem to be much to give or to let go of, let alone free choice, clear space or
autonomy. The seed bed out of which these springs is the experience of ‘common
ground.’ You access this in meditation through reflecting on what we all have
in common – mortality, kamma, the potential for goodwill and awakening.
And in that open space where meditation takes you, you feel the fragility of
boundaries and the interest in mutuality: we can only survive through the goodwill
and cooperation of others, and our lives are enriched by friends. But not
everyone can begin in meditation; the open space isn’t entered just by sitting
still. In fact sitting still and looking within is a pretty difficult place to
begin when you’re strongly held by isolationist-view. Where we can find an opening is in common
ground as a shared and safe environment.

When I began meditating in a
monastery in Thailand, there were two sources of ease and joy. One was going
out on alms-round in the local town, seeing and being warmly received by people
giving a little food. What made it
better was, strangely enough, the silence of the offering and the anonymity. The
offering wasn’t because I was someone special, or deserved it, or was part of
the family; I couldn’t even speak the language. So the offering happened
outside of the context of personality; it was a meeting at the place where I
was vulnerable and exposed. On the street, penniless, with an empty bowl. This isn’t a theory, but the living enactment
of being accepted into the web of vulnerable, mortal but sharing beings. And
rather than eliciting a mood of tragedy and despair, that felt like a relief
and a release into something bigger and more timeless.

The other source of ease was
the fortnightly recitation of the Rule, the Pāṭimokkha. It was the same doorway
as the alms-round. No conversation, no performance, no need to be different: I
was just one of the monks who sat there while another recited the Buddha’s
words in an incomprehensible language for about fifty minutes. And there we all
were, held in our integrity and respect, with our individualities accepted but
not highlighted. We have a relative
self, and that’s fine as long as it remains relative and doesn’t split off into
its own bubble.

Cittaviveka monastery isn’t
an especially interesting place by some standards … not much happens
outside of meditation, talks and work, and yet a good range of beings regularly
pass through, of many nationalities, ethnicities, and financial resources. They’re
seen, talked with, and given the shared requisites and some free individual space.
Locals who live outside the monastery drop by to walk around or offer advice;
some work here on a regular basis. The place is basically run by unpaid
volunteers. It’s a commonwealth that had no mission to be so; it all just
happened because people like to operate that way and there was the opportunity
to do so.

Last year we had a homeless
woman stay with us for about three months. Prior to being here she’d been at
another monastery for about six; before that, stretched a battered history and
teetering on the edge of suicide. So, if you possibly can, if the person can
keep precepts and live within the boundaries, you take them in. You could
think, ‘But we might be stuck with this woman forever!’ You could play the
track that says ‘What if hundreds of people turn up at the door?’ But in the
direct experience of the heart, there isn’t a ‘forever’, and right now there
aren’t a hundred people at the door. There’s just another vulnerable and
exposed sentient being; so now there’s the space to respond. And after the three months, the woman had
steadied, found her own ground and moved on.

I’m sure that having plenty
of time to meditate helped her enormously; but theoretically she could have sat
still with a few books and practised on her own. But even if she had, what that
have helped her out of the mess of her life? – the problem with despair is
that you’re always ‘on your own.’ It’s
obvious to me that there is a healing power in communality; this is especially
clear as it is through the reduction of this that people are in dire straits.
The common land, the untidy places where people could wander and meet, and all
classes could rub elbows, is shrinking. It’s not only ‘natural’ land that’s
lost to the commons: when I was a child in London, all the kids played together
on the street; parents frequented their neighbours’ houses; child-minding was
just a neighbourly and unpaid thing to do. Street-markets, or the presence of
people standing conversing on the street was part of the social landscape. As
the streets became increasingly ‘no-stopping, keep shopping’ zones; as the
townscape centred around how to move cars (the most isolated and destructive means of
transport yet invented) through them; as property developers bought up neighbourhoods
and converted them into high-rise estates and malls that you can be ordered out
of (I have) – the free-access mingling space dwindled. Crime increased, and
some streets, even areas, are no longer safe. Because there’s nobody really there in the spaces through which people
move. Instead, being driven along the prescribed highways to the prescribed work
place or the mass shopping mall focuses attention onto getting your stuff and
taking it inside your bubble. You might have an exchange with a ticket machine,
or a voice might ask you to wait and thank you for your patience – but
there’s less and less people there. So, while the heart steadily closes, the
message is to sit back, look at the screen, listen to the music – or buy something.

So the removal of free and
living space, the waning of the commons, has its consequences. As society loses that organ, it loses
location, and thus loses respect for the environment. The planet has been
paying for it, and now as the global economy falters and conflict escalates,
humans are also counting the social and environmental costs of globalization. But
I’m not advocating an end to global cooperation, but just that we universally
agree to respect local common space. Nor am I a communist in the way that the
term is used, because ‘Communist’ societies were never voluntary, free-access environments.
They did pretty much the same as any centralizing state does: ‘public’ land is
owned by the state, not the commons, and it’s the state that decides what is
for the public good. Yet what the state rarely does is activate an ethos that
supports morality, generosity and personal relinquishment – one that sees inner
fulfilment rather than wealth, prestige or power to be the highest happiness. The
fact is that the state can only support, not create, the commons – because
the commons happens naturally in the right space. Like a regenerating woodland,
you just have to clear away what chokes it, protect the boundaries and wait.

The culture that does just
that is truly ‘religious’: the origin of the word is to do with ‘connection’
and ‘creating a bond.’ Religion can ossify into dogma; but if it stays connected
to real life it supports the system of loyalties, mutual respect and group
awareness that all folk culture is based upon. It’s still around. On the
streets of Chengdu, I’ve seen people dancing and woman walking unaccompanied at
night; in rural Spain I’ve seen villages come alive at sunset; and in London
there is growth in terms of community gardens, spontaneous public meditation
sittings and developing local networks. Folk culture grows on the margins, away
from the political centre: and the classic marginal settlement is the forest
monastery, apparently cut off, but a vital organ for the society as whole.

In such a monastery, the
fortnightly Pāṭimokkha (literally ‘thorough bond’) is the formal statement of
the commons, made valid by the respect for self and others in the ethics that
it outlines. But it is lived out in the unstructured times, where conversation
may swing between the anecdotal, the doctrinal, the practical and the playful. The
boundaries remain, the centre loosens. It’s the same in the retreat centre, the
workplace, the village and in the woodlands. The community may create the
boundary by what it says, but brings communality alive from mutual regard and respect. This is because the commons can’t be established by ideology or law, but grows
where those are digested into organic humanity through voluntary acts. Generosity,
morality, renunciation and meditation are the actions, but humbly and
wonderfully enough, the really vital ingredient is location: shared and lived-in
space.